Assignments? What assign...ah. Those assignments.

York in November, mmm.
Photo by dvdbramhall

It's week 5, but no blues this far north of Cambridge, excepting the stunningly blue sky we were treated to on Sunday morning (is it wrong to be a little bit smug that only the North was treated to it?)

Instead, week 5 is yellow and pink; yellow for the colour that all the lecturers seem to use for printing assignment details on, and pink for the "declaration of academic integrity" cover sheet with which I shall be much more familiar by the end of reading week, which is next week.

In fact, one assignment is floating about in the print cloud now, waiting for my attention. Don't worry, I'm not being especially virtuous, it's due a little bit earlier than the others (tomorrow, in fact). This one is for Psycholinguistics, two "one-page" answers about the Motor Theory of speech perception vs. the auditory theories and also about Newness vs. length and Heavy-NP shift in double object constructions (my old friend...) The actual topics aren't too bad, firstly because I find them incredibly interesting, and secondly because we're not actually expected to do research outside of class notes/the reading pack, in this instance at least. However, the main point of the exercise is something I find MUCH more challenging...being concise. I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice that I'm a several-line sentence sinner (if Dickens can get away with so can I....can't I?) so I'm finding it very difficult to condense lots of information into one lone A4 page. Especially as there's so much to say!

This same challenge is to be repeated in my Language Acquisition assignment, due a week today. The second section is basically a summary of a study and its main components, 500 words. OK, I can squish that down relatively comfortably. But the first section? Find data of first language acquisition in a language other than English and apply any of the theories we've studied so far to it. I've chosen French (partially because I can actually understand it), and already I can see that there's just so much to say! Carefully choosing which aspect to focus on may not be so bad, as I'll partially be constrained by the data that I can get my mitts on - but only having 500 words again?! Oh word count, you are a cruel, cruel mistress.

At least that's my only problem - I am once more thanking my lucky stars for everything I learnt last year in the library as I blithely play with Metalib. Some of my coursemates thought that this was some kind of communicable disease. This won't be the case after tomorrow, as our subject liaison librarian is giving over 2 hours of her time to drag us all out of the Google mire, but I'm quite pleased to have a mini-headstart on the data rush.

Anyway, what am I doing here? I have pages to print, data to mine and some very odd phonetic-type things to do...which aren't getting done here. To work!

(P.S. I managed to get some Lindy in last weekend, toddling off to Leeds to dance the Tranky Doo with some very pleasant lindyhoppers led by Cat Foley. I've never done lindy a la Scouse before, but it was very entertaining! And here's what we did...)

Sweet, sweet research

I had a mini-epiphany yesterday. In addition to having a generally very productive day, I was lucky enough to garner a few gems of wisdom which I think will prove invaluable over the next 4 years...and longer.

Research training: helping me to read clearly
Image by micsalac

We undertake research training with the indomitable Tamar Keren-Portnoy who, in conjunction with Eytan Zweig, kindly put on an extra hour of training to look a little closer at how to tackle academic papers.

I've read academic articles before, at undergraduate level and since coming to York, but I was beginning to wonder if I was being as efficient and productive as I could - and besides, the papers are getting exceedingly difficult! But with Tamar and Eytan on hand, I feel reassured, and here's what I learnt, if you were wondering:

• Don't imagine that you're going to understand absolutely everything you read. If you already knew everything, you wouldn't need teaching (and you probably wouldn't be human...) Try to pull out the bits that you can understand and find someone to discuss the other bits with.
• Look up unknown terms as you go along (in textbooks, dictionaries or online) - it's not like reading a foreign language, so pushing through will only cause more confusion in the long run.
• Use Google Scholar to find citations of the work you're reading - other scholars may have summarised or criticised the work previously (though be aware that they may have focused on a different aspect of it)
• After reading, try to summarise what you've read. If there are gaps in your summary, this should flag up the bits you need to go back to.

The raw material...from which a refined thesis will hopefully come!
Image from wikipedi

Between us, Eytan and I summarised (word of the moment) the transition from under- to postgraduate like this: at undergraduate level, you're given discrete blocks of knowledge like neat, refined cubes of white sugar with obvious edges. At postgraduate level, you're not just given the raw cane, you're given a whole field of raw canes which stretches as far as the eye can see. At least now, thanks to yesterday's session, I've sharpened my machete and I can get on with making my way through the field.

Finally, on a slightly different note, the importance of the arts and humanities get a boost in an inspiring piece by the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, Sir Lescek Borysiewicz, (a medic himself), in which the Cambridge Bilingual Information Network (BIN-C) gets a worthy mention. I can but hope that the powers-that-be, and more importantly, arts students of the future, take notice.

What am I?

I have more tongues than any one person would know what to do with.

I draw lots and lots of trees.

I am just one of the many strings to Chomsky's bow.

I am a multidisciplinary area of knowledge which dabbles in both the Arts and Humanities, and in the Social Sciences.

And in the last lies a smidgin of a problem.

I (I'm now talking as myself, and not as my subject!) am incredibly lucky to have funding from the ESRC, that's the Economic and Social Research Council, which is the main funding body in the UK for the social sciences. And on Tuesday this week, I went down to my dear alma mater, the University of Sheffield, for my first ESRC event - the launch of the White Rose Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre, the organisation which doles out the funding for Masters and PhD students like me, and for various projects and centres of excellence at the three Yorkshire universities involved (that's Leeds, Sheffield and York, if you were wondering). So far, so good. The event was intended to give us more information about what the WR DTC does (see above), and to talk about ways in which expertise, training and opportunities can be shared across the three institutions. All very admirable indeed. This kind of information, along with (a lot of) glowing examples of existing White Rose collaborative projects took up most of the morning. Not forgetting the glorious addition of a short session by Maria Mawson, Sheffield's social sciences liaison librarian whose suggested resources yielded an awful lot of useful stuff, as librarians' talks tend to. Her session probably was the most useful of the day.

Not a definition, but a defining image:
the wug test...on a mug!
Photo by ninasaurusrex

Indeed, it was the zenith that followed pretty rapidly by a deep, ravine-like nadir when we broke out for the discipline-related "cluster" sessions. Not for all the participants, and it wasn't really the fault of the organisers either, as such. The problem lay in the different ways that the three universities classify linguistics. York takes quite a scientific angle on it, emphasising the empirical and experimental side of things with specialisms in forensic speech science and psycholinguistics - hence why I am at York, and why they offer an ESRC 1+3 scholarship. I don't know about Leeds, but Sheffield seems to take a more artsy view generally, linguistics being all wrapped up with literature and offering lots of joint modules between the two. Both departments are fantastic, but the upshot of all this is that there were no linguists from Sheffield or Leeds, completely knocking out our networking and collaborative opportunities, which was such a shame. Of course, many people found the day to be incredibly useful - some friends of mine in the Politics stream reported some great shared experiences - and I found out that there's some very interesting research going on within Psychology, for example on language processing, so that will be an area to look into in the near future. But I can only hope that future events provide a little more in the way of networking and collaborative opportunities...and that there'll be some more social sciency linguists in Yorkshire in the future!

As a non-linguistic aside, I ran into the library marketing guru himself, Ned Potter a.k.a the Wikiman, in the Harry Fairhurst building (LFA) yesterday, and had a very enjoyable library-themed natter, my first in some time! It's now about six weeks since I left the Classics library and apart from missing Cambridge as a city, there are times when the dynamism of the Cambridge library mafia and the community feeling in Classics me manque, aussi. However, seeing as I'm virtually living in LFA now, library fixes will never be too far away.